SF/Fantasy/Horror Notes

The 500 numbered hardcover copies have already sold out pre-pub, but collectors still have a chance to snag the 26 lettered hand-bound copies of the limited edition of Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk tour de force, with new jacket art and interior illustrations by Patrick Arrasmith. The hand-bound edition, signed by the author, includes additional art and a custom tray case. The price is steep, but Stephenson's vision of a thoroughly wired near-future where the computer geek is king has inspired plenty of techies who may find this a worthwhile reason to cash in some dot-com stock. (Subterranean [www.subterraneanpress.com], $500 488p ISBN 978-1-59606-157-6)

Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson follows 2003's Tales Before Tolkien with Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction, a collection of stories and poems said to have inspired C.S. Lewis's speculative fiction. The table of contents is dominated by familiar fantasists such as Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit and Rudyard Kipling, but Anderson is careful to also include work by Roger Lancelyn Green (best known as Lewis's biographer), William Sambrot and other authors now largely unfamiliar to modern fantasy readers, making for a well-rounded and enjoyable exploration of early 20th-century fantastic literature. (Del Rey, $15 paper 368p ISBN 978-0-345-49890-8)